Throughout her career, Renée Fleming has embraced a wide range of styles, Mozart and Strauss of course, while also giving pride of place to the French repertoire, from Massenet to Dutilleux. In his moving Poèmes pour Mi - Mi being the affectionate diminutive that the composer liked to give to his first wife Claire Delbos - composed in 1936-37, Messiaen uses a very particular rhythmic language, deliberately using irregular durations to translate the different stages of passion. A procedure dear to Messiaen and one that the American soprano knows how to render well. Renée Fleming recorded this piece a few years ago under the direction of Alan Gilbert for the album Poèmes (Messiaen was then coupled with Ravel's Shéhérazade and Dutilleux's last work Le Temps L'Horloge). To round off the evening, Bruckner's so-called 'Romantic' Symphony No. 4, bathed in pure colours evoking an ideal world that one would like to preserve. The composer had left some notes to accompany the listening: "You will thus be able to see or hear a medieval town, knights riding proud horses, a love that has been rejected, a dance for the hunting dinner...". Let yourself be swept away.
